Solar Forest Charging Station for Electric Vehicles

via Designboom - Weblog on 8/5/09

solar forest parking station

designer neville mars has developed an electric vehicle charging station that takes
the form of an evergreen glade of solar trees. the photovoltaic grove serves a dual function,
acting as a go to source for clean renewable energy while providing a shady spot for cars
to park as they charge.




solar forest parking station

each of the trees in the forest are composed of a set of photovoltaic leaves mounted
on a branching poll. the base of each trunk features an power outlet that can be used
to charge your electrical vehicle.

Oamenii de ştiinţă au descoperit electricitatea wireless

via Realitatea .NET - IT & Ştiinţă by Realitatea.NET on 7/24/09

Le spunem adio cablurilor, prizelor şi mufelor de toate felurile. Cel puţin aşa ne îndeamnă cercetătorii de la TED confrence din Oxford care au demonstrat că televizoarele sau telefoanele mobile ar putea fi alimentate cu energie wireless.

Era energiei fără fire a făcut un pas înainte susţin cercetătorii, care cred că aparatele electrocasnice şi telefoanele mobile vor putea fi alimentate cu energie fără a mai fi nevoie de fire şi cabluri. Specialiştii spun că acest lucru ar fi posibil folosind doar principii simple ale fizicii.

Directorul executiv al Witricity, Eric Giler, ca declarat că noua tehnologie va putea în cele din urmă să înlocuiască bateriile, dar şi sursele de electricitate convenţionale.

Electricitatea wireless poate fi obţinută prin “rezonanţă electromagnetică” un fenomen fizic în care obiectele cu aceeaşi frecvenţă de rezonanţă pot efectua transferuri de energie între ele, fără să fie nevoie de un impact cu un alt obiect.

Cercetarea în domeniul electricităţii wireless a început în urmă cu câţiva ani şi a avut ca sursă de inspiraţie munca unui grup de oameni de ştiinţă de la Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 2008, Intel a dezvăluit câteva dintre soluţiile sale în ceea ce priveşte energia wireless, iar anul acesta în cadrul Consumer Electronics Show, desfăşurat în Las Vegas, mai mulţi producători participanţi la eveniment au dezvăluit câteva dispozitive de reîncărcare wire-free.

World's largest solar array planned for the Sahara Desert

via DVICE by AdamFrucci on 6/22/09

The Sahara Desert gets a lot of sun. In fact, it gets so much that if a mere 0.3% of its area was used for a solar plant, it could power all of Europe. So it only makes sense that 20 German companies are looking into doing just that.

The plan would be to scatter solar collectors all across northern Africa in politically stable countries rather than putting them all in one spot. It'll take years to build everything as well as $555 billion in funds, but in the long run it'll be well worth it.

Intel's Platform Power Management

via Gizmodo by Brian Lam on 6/19/09

Intel Research showed me a demo of their Platform Power Management system. Essentially, they're applying the smart, quick, hardware level idling you find on a CPU to many system parts. The result: systems that idle at 10x less juice.

The tech is applied to things like USB ports, which in 3.0, will go from polling (clock based, always checking) devices to being managed via events, so they can sleep whenever not being used. And graphics, when the page isn't changing, can be run out of a frame buffer so the GPU and video RAM can sleep. When I say more sleep, I mean for additional milliseconds or longer. This adds up, over the course of a day when people stop to read or step away from their computers. In the past, the OS controlled the power savings, and that required power to process in turn, so you were using the system's power to manage power, keeping those other components from ever really turning off. By doing power management with more granularity, in hardware and software together, you can switching things on/off fast enough to fit in lots of "naps" and you can also do it with less processing overhead.

I'm excited for this tech to go everywhere where there's a chip.